Dear Members. First of all, I congratulate and appreciate efforts of Dr. A. R. D. Prasad, Dr. Sunita Barve, Mr. Vimal Kumar, Mr. Vinod Mishra, Mr. D. P. Tripathi and all others who developed livecd and made our job of library automation much easier. I saved lakhs of rupees of our institute by implementing koha in library. I also developed library website with interactive features with free internet resources. All this is acknowledged but in this one year I have following observations and experiences:- 1. Things are totally different in university and college libraries. In Indian colleges, its “Mass Education” rather than “Quality Education”. 2. Lack of Staff. For 5000 students I am provided with only 5 staff instead of govt. norms of 20 staff. 3. Lack of skilled staff. Most of class III and IV employess in library are aged and computer illeterate. 4. Lack of infrastructure, especially for networked environment. How to orient 5000 students without LCD, internet and sufficient PC/Laptops? Till last month, I was not even having a single PC for 5000 students in library. 5. I got most of the students list almost 2 months after start of academic year. I had to struggle for managing both patron import and collection development at the same time. 6. Lack of IT trained staff. We have 15 IT teachers in our college and all were useless when it came to linux environment. If this is a case with an PG IT teacher what you can expect from an librarian without IT background? 7. Mentality and Attitude of patrons (both teachers and students) has not yet completely changed. They want everything in hand and are reluctant to even search on catalogue and shelves. Problems are not in adopting open source software, but the work culture in which a college librarian has to work. Since they are struggling in their routine job itself, perhaps they are reluctant and also not confidant enough to excute it without the support of vendors. Right from installation to data conversion and patron import, I handled koha without any problem and thus I get frequent request for consultancy, right from librarians to IT companies, but the above listed observations and experiences restrict me. ICT in itself is a full time job and morover its a fast developing sector. Thus, instead of personal consultancy, I feel that organizations like INFLIBNET can come up with better service facilites and flexbile hosting plans for OSS like Koha and Dspace with a nationwide young team of librarians trained with sufficient IT skills to execute the same. Colleges can choose one of the two options:- 1. Koha and Dspace hosted at data centre of INFLIBNET itself. 2. Koha and Dspace installed and preconfigured on servers and purchasing these servers itself with necessary customization and support. Nowadays with softwares like teamviewer, and mobile features like whatsup, personal visit to college can be easily cutdown. This will also help us in standardization and exchange of catalogue data. Moreover, it will be easy for both librarians and college authorities to adopt/subscribe to this technolgy service, since it will be an another product/service of INFLIBNET like SOUL and N-List. Special thanks to Mr. Vinod Mishra who shared his views with us and also gave me an opportunity to share my experiences. As it is rightly said, necessity is the mother of inventions and I am sure, together we all can change and enhance the system. Mr. Mahesh M. Angadi, Librarian, Model College, Dombivli (E). Contact No. 9869120258, (0251) 2470010. On Sat, Feb 14, 2015 at 7:44 PM, Vinod Kumar Mishra < vinod_librarian@rediffmail.com> wrote:
Dear All,
We(myself and Mr. D.P. Tripathi)have taken initiative to implement open source software like Koha, DSpace, Joomla etc. in libraries and time to time motivating for the same to library professionals. I was thinking i am doing the great job free of cost but when i saw today a Tender of renowned Institute for Just installation of Koha, data migration from SOUL/Current ILMS and little training to staffs, i shocked and realize that real heroes are those people who have given opportunity for the same and successfully they are running Koha. They have expended Just on our TA/DA and honorarium as per government rules and saved Lakhs of Public money.
In present case although i proposed the institute for the same task and given example of a renowned near by library where we have did the job and Koha is running successfully but even though they opted for the Commercial firm service which could be easily done by us in a much better way than any commercial firm. I do not know why they opted for the same and what is lacking from our side, however one can avail community support for installation/training on Koha and if desire later they can avail commercial support (AMC) for maintenance, by this method also they can save lakh of money on initial implementation of Koha.
I would simply like to ask a question from such Professionals that:
WILL YOU TAKE SAME DECISION IF YOU HAVE TO INVEST MONEY FROM YOUR OWN POCKET? OR WHAT DIFFICULTY YOU FACED IN INVITING ANY CAPABLE EXPERT FOR THE SAME TASKS FROM LIS COMMUNITY?
I would like to request all leaders/Decision makers of the LIS community to avail such services from LIS community it will not only save money but strengthen our library profession and reputation as well as you will be called as a good leader and decision maker in LIS domain.
You may visit http://mishravk.com/ for LIS related other activities and free support.
Thanking You.
Vinod Kumar Mishra Assistant Librarian NIT Rourkela
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